On Wed, 2007-10-31 at 17:10 +0000, Alan Cox wrote:
> Some drives have that, some don't. Most also honour the specific
> timeout setting via hdparm -S. (-S 0 being don't stop)
Hmm, I didn't notice that option before, here's probably why:
-s Enable/disable the power-on in standby feature, if supported by
the drive. If enabled, the drive is powered-up in the standby
mode to allow the controller to sequence the spin-up of devices.
This feature is usually disabled and the drive is powered-up in
the active mode (see -C above). Note that a drive may also
allow to enable this feature by a jumper. Some SATA drives sup-
port the control of this feature by pin 11 of the SATA power
connector. In these cases, this command may be unsupported or
may have no effect. -S Set the standby (spindown) timeout for
the drive. This value is used by the drive to determine how
long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the
spindle motor to save power. Under such circumstances, the
drive may take as long as 30 seconds to respond to a subsequent
disk access, though most drives are much quicker. The encoding
of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero
means "timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically
enter standby mode. Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5
seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values
from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yield-
ing timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 sig-
nifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-
defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254
is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds.
Note that some older drives may have very different interpreta-
tions of these values.
There's no "-S" option section, it's buried in the middle of "-s". Is
your man file the same?
Though "spindown" is a different kettle of fish to just pulling the head
off to one side. I heard mine doing that several times in just a few
seconds, earlier today. No, it's not a drive with read errors, even
though that's *almost* the same sort of behaviour (the infamous click
whirr, click whirr).
--
(This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's
important to the thread.)
Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.
